"Tutors’ motives and experiences of the Writers’ Peer Support Group, an online writing center." from 2016

Highly abridged version for Blogger

"Tutors’ motives and experiences of the Writers’ Peer Support Group, an online writing center."

Abstract

The Writers’ Peer Support Group (PSG) comprises 30 volunteer readers and reviewers who assist writers online to develop their writing skills and manuscripts. The Writers’ PSG has supported numerous writers and conducted over 100 reviews. This presentation will introduce the PSG, its tutors, and their experiences collaborating with authors and the PSG. Data was collected via an online survey.

CONCLUSIONS

Socialization into the PSG community: meetings, more direct and frequent interpersonal contact*;

Pre-readership tutor training (videos could be beneficial): including Google Drive and Google Docs orientations;

Additional models of feedback for tutors; 

Pre-service checklist, and samples from old papers, for writers to use as resources and to help standardize submissions; 

Pre-service submission form to increase consistency and efficiency of submissions;

Post-service feedback form for feedback to all tutors;

Balance: Tutors choose papers that interest them, so we need a range of readers, yet also many enjoy learning from papers outwith their normal field of expertise.

FUTURE CONSIDERATIONS

Practical

• Need for increased record keeping in the future
• Increase Japanese support & users
• More advertising and promotion

Research

• In-depth qualitative interviews: Clients and tutors
• Collect/implement feedback from clients and tutors
• Refine/increase data collection and analysis of existing data

Except as otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Please attribute to the JALT Writers' Peer Support Group (PSG).

PRESENTATION was made at the JALT International Conference in 2016

Lucovich, D., Beaufait, P., Uehara, S., & Gallagher, B. (2016, November, 27).
"Tutors’ motives and experiences of the Writers’ Peer Support Group, an online writing center."
JALT 2016: 42nd Annual International Conference on Language Teaching and Learning.
Aichi Industry & Labor Center: Nagoya, Aichi Pref., JP.
https://goo.gl/Cwk3wi